The Very Best of Charles De Lint

  Those came later.

  11

  The last week before the show was simple chaos. There seemed to be a hundred and one things that none of them had thought of, all of which had to be done at the last moment. And to make matters worse, Jilly still had one unfinished canvas haunting her by Friday night.

  It stood on her easel, untitled, barely-sketched in images, still in monochrome. The colours eluded her. She knew what she wanted, but every time she stood before her easel, her mind went blank. She seemed to forget everything she’d ever known about art. The inner essence of the canvas rose up inside her like a ghost, so close she could almost touch it, but then fled daily, like a dream lost upon waking. The outside world intruded. A knock on the door. The ringing of the phone.

  The show opened in exactly seven days.

  Annie’s baby was almost two weeks old. She was a happy, satisfied infant, the kind of baby that was forever making contented little gurgling sounds, as though talking to herself; she never cried. Annie herself was a nervous wreck.

  “I’m scared,” she told Jilly when she came over to the loft that afternoon. “Everything’s going too well. I don’t deserve it.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby propped up on the Murphy bed between two pillows. Annie kept fidgeting. Finally she picked up a pencil and started drawing stick figures on pieces of paper.

  “Don’t say that,” Jilly said. “Don’t even think it.”

  “But it’s true. Look at me. I’m not like you or Sophie. I’m not like Angel. What have I got to offer my baby? What’s she going to have to look up to when she looks at me?”

  “A kind, caring mother.”

  Annie shook her head. “I don’t feel like that. I feel like everything’s sort of fuzzy and it’s like pushing through cobwebs to just to make it through the day.”

  “We’d better make an appointment with you to see a doctor.”

  “Make it a shrink,” Annie said. She continued to doodle, then looked down at what she was doing. “Look at this. It’s just crap.”

  Before Jilly could see, Annie swept the sheaf of papers to the floor.

  “Oh, jeez,” she said as they went fluttering all over the place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  She got up before Jilly could and tossed the lot of them in the garbage container beside the stove. She stood there for a long moment, taking deep breaths, holding them, slowly letting them out.

  “Annie…?”

  She turned as Jilly approached her. The glow of motherhood that had seemed to revitalize her in the month before the baby was born had slowly worn away. She was pale again. Wan. She looked so lost that all Jilly could do was put her arms around her and offer a wordless comfort.

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said against Jilly’s hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just…I know I should be really happy, but I just feel scared and confused.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “God, listen to me. All it seems I can do is complain about my life.”

  “It’s not like you’ve had a great one,” Jilly said.

  “Yeah, but when I compare it to what it was like before I met you, it’s like I moved up into heaven.”

  “Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Jilly said.

  Annie stepped back out of her arms. “Maybe I will—if you really don’t mind…?”

  “I really don’t mind.”

  “Thanks.”

  Annie glanced towards the bed, her gaze pausing on the clock on the wall above the stove.

  “You’re going to be late for work,” she said.

  “That’s all right. I don’t think I’ll go in tonight.”

  Annie shook her head. “No, go on. You’ve told me how busy it gets on a Friday night.”

  Jilly still worked part-time at Kathryn’s Café on Battersfield Road. She could just imagine what Wendy would say if she called in sick. There was no one else in town this weekend to take her shift, so that would leave Wendy working all the tables on her own.

  “If you’re sure,” Jilly said.

  “We’ll be okay,” Annie said. “Honestly.”

  She went over to the bed and picked up the baby, cradling her gently in her arms.

  “Look at her,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s hard to believe something so beautiful came out of me.” She turned to Jilly, adding before Jilly could speak, “That’s a kind of magic all by itself, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe one of the best we can make,” Jilly said.

  12

  How Can You Call This Love? by Claudia Feder. Oils. Old Market Studio, Newford, 1990.

  A fat man sits on a bed in a cheap hotel room. He’s removing his shirt. Through the ajar door of the bathroom behind him, a thin girl in bra and panties can be seen sitting on the toilet, shooting up.

  She appears to be about fourteen.

  * * *

  I just pay attention to things I told her. I guess that’s why, when I got off my shift and came back to loft, Annie was gone. Because I pay such good attention. The baby was still on the bed, lying between the pillows, sleeping. There was a note on the kitchen table:

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just keep wanting to hit something. I look at little Jilly and I think about my mother and I get so scared. Take care of her for me. Teach her magic.

  Please don’t hate me

  I don’t know how long I sat and stared at those sad, piteous words, tears streaming from my eyes.

  I should never have gone to work. I should never have left her alone. She really thought she was just going to replay her own childhood. She told me, I don’t know how many times she told me, but I just wasn’t paying attention, was I?

  Finally I got on the phone. I called Angel. I called Sophie. I called Lou Fucceri. I called everybody I could think of to go out and look for Annie. Angel was at the loft with me when we finally heard. I was the one who picked up the phone.

  I heard what Lou said: “A patrolman brought her into the General not fifteen minutes ago, ODing on Christ knows what. She was just trying to self-destruct, is what he said. I’m sorry, Jilly. But she died before I got here.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just passed the phone to Angel and went to sit on the bed. I held little Jilly in my arms and then I cried some more.

  * * *

  I was never joking about Sophie. She really does have faerie blood. It’s something I can’t explain, something we don’t talk much about, something I just know and she denies. But she did promise me that she’d bless Annie’s baby, just the way fairy godmothers would do it in all those old stories.

  “I gave her the gift of a happy life,” she told me later. “I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.”

  But that’s the way it works in fairy tales, too, isn’t it? Something always goes wrong, or there wouldn’t be a story. You have to be strong, you have to earn your happily ever after.

  Annie was strong enough to go away from her baby when she felt like all she could do was just lash out, but she wasn’t strong enough to help herself. That was the awful gift her parents gave her.

  * * *

  I never finished that last painting in time for the show, but I found something to take its place. Something that said more to me in just a few rough lines than anything I’ve ever done.

  I was about to throw out my garbage when I saw those crude little drawings that Annie had been doodling on my kitchen table the night she died. They were like the work of a child.

  I framed one of them and hung it in the show.

  “I guess we’re five coyotes and one coyote ghost now,” was all Sophie said when she saw what I had done.

  13

  In the House of My Enemy, by Annie Mackle. Pencils. Yoors Street Studio, Newford, 1991.

  The images are crudely rendered. In a house that is merely a square with a triangle on top, are three stick figures, one plain, two with small “skirt” triangles to represent their gender. The two larger figures are beating the smaller one wi
th what might be crooked sticks, or might be belts.

  The small figure is cringing away.

  14

  In the visitor’s book set out at the show, someone wrote: “I can never forgive those responsible for what’s been done to us. I don’t even want to try.”

  “Neither do I,” Jilly said when she read it. “God help me, neither do I.”

  The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep

  If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will

  throw a lot of rubbish into it. —William A. Orton

  1

  Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.

  2

  It was my father who told me that dreams want to be real. When you start to wake up, he said, they hang on and try to slip out into the waking world when you don’t notice. Very strong dreams, he added, can almost do it; they can last for almost half a day, but not much longer.

  I asked him if any ever made it. If any of the people our subconscious minds toss up and make real while we’re sleeping had ever actually stolen out into this world from the dream world.

  He knew of at least one that had, he said.

  He had that kind of lost look in his eyes that made me think of my mother. He always looked like that when he talked about her, which wasn’t often.

  Who was it? I asked, hoping he’d dole out another little tidbit about my mother. Is it someone I know?

  Even as I asked, I was wondering how he related my mother to a dream. He’d at least known her. I didn’t have any memories, just imaginings. Dreams.

  But he only shook his head. Not really, he told me. It happened a long time ago. But I often wondered, he added almost to himself, what did she dream of?

  That was a long time ago and I don’t know if he ever found out. If he did, he never told me. But lately I’ve been wondering about it. I think maybe they don’t dream. I think that if they do, they get pulled back into the dream world.

  And if we’re not too careful, they can pull us back with them.

  3

  “I’ve been having the strangest dreams,” Sophie Etoile said, more as an observation than a conversational opener.

  She and Jilly Coppercorn had been enjoying a companionable silence while they sat on the stone river wall in the old part of Lower Crowsea’s Market. The wall is by a small public courtyard, surrounded on three sides by old three-story brick and stone town houses, peaked with mansard roofs, the dormer windows thrusting out from the walls like hooded eyes with heavy brows. The buildings date back over a hundred years, leaning against each other like old friends too tired to talk, just taking comfort from each other’s presence.

  The cobblestoned streets that web out from the courtyard are narrow, too tight a fit for a car, even the small imported makes. They twist and turn, winding in and around the buildings more like back alleys than thoroughfares. If you have any sort of familiarity with the area you can maze your way by those lanes to find still smaller courtyards, hidden and private, and deeper still, secret gardens.

  There are more cats in Old Market than anywhere else in Newford and the air smells different. Though it sits just a few blocks west of some of the city’s principal thoroughfares, you can hardly hear the traffic, and you can’t smell it at all. No exhaust, no refuse, no dead air. In Old Market it always seems to smell of fresh bread baking, cabbage soups, frying fish, roses and those tart, sharp-tasting apples that make the best strudels.

  Sophie and Jilly were bookended by stairs going down to the Kickaha River on either side of them. Pale yellow light from the streetlamp behind them put a glow on their hair, haloing each with her own nimbus of light—Jilly’s darker, all loose tangled curls, Sophie’s a soft auburn, hanging in ringlets. They each had a similar slim build, though Sophie was somewhat bustier. In the half-dark of the streetlamp’s murky light, their small figures could almost be taken for each other, but when the light touched their features as they turned to talk to each other, Jilly could be seen to have the quick, clever features of a Rackham pixie, while Sophie’s were softer, as though rendered by Rossetti or Burne-Jones.

  Though similarly dressed with paint-stained smocks over loose T-shirts and baggy cotton pants, Sophie still managed to look tidy, while Jilly could never seem to help a slight tendency towards scruffiness. She was the only one of the two with paint in her hair.

  “What sort of dreams?” she asked.

  It was almost four o’clock in the morning. The narrow streets of Old Market lay empty and still about them, except for the odd prowling cat, and cats can be like the hint of a whisper when they want, ghosting and silent, invisible presences. The two women had been working at Sophie’s studio on a joint painting, a collaboration that was going to combine Jilly’s precise delicate work with Sophie’s current penchant for bright flaring colours and loosely-rendered figures.

  Neither was sure the experiment would work, but they’d been enjoying themselves immensely with it, so it really didn’t matter.

  “Well, they’re sort of serial,” Sophie said. “You know, where you keep dreaming about the same place, the same people, the same events, except each night you’re a little further along in the story.”

  Jilly gave her an envious look. “I’ve always wanted to have that kind of dream. Christy’s had them. I think he told me that it’s called lucid dreaming.”

  “They’re anything but lucid,” Sophie said. “If you ask me, they’re downright strange.”

  “No, no. It just means that you know you’re dreaming, when you’re dreaming, and have some kind of control over what happens in the dream.”

  Sophie laughed. “I wish.”

  4

  I’m wearing a long pleated skirt and one of those white cotton peasant blouses that’s cut way too low in the bodice. I don’t know why. I hate that kind of bodice. I keep feeling like I’m going to fall out whenever I bend over. Definitely designed by a man. Wendy likes to wear that kind of thing from time to time, but it’s not for me.

  Nor is going barefoot. Especially not here. I’m standing on a path, but it’s muddy underfoot, all squishy between my toes. It’s sort of nice in some ways, but I keep getting the feeling that something’s going to sidle up to me, under the mud, and brush against my foot, so I don’t want to move, but I don’t want to just stand here either.

  Everywhere I look it’s all marsh. Low flat fens, with just the odd crack willow or alder trailing raggedy vines the way you see Spanish moss do in pictures of the Everglades, but this definitely isn’t Florida. It feels more Englishy, if that makes sense.

  I know if I step off the path I’ll be in muck up to my knees.

  I can see a dim kind of light off in the distance, way off the path. I’m attracted to it, the way any light in the darkness seems to call out, welcoming you, but I don’t want to brave the deeper mud or the pools of still water that glimmer in the pale starlight.

  It’s all mud and reeds, cattails, bulrushes and swamp grass and I just want to be back home in bed, but I can’t wake up. There’s a funny smell in the air, a mix of things rotting and stagnant water. I feel like there’s something horrible in the shadows under those strange overhung trees—especially the willows, the tall sharp leaves of sedge and water plantain growing thick around their trunks. It’s like there are eyes watching me from all sides, dark misshapen heads floating frog-like in the water, only the eyes showing, staring. Quicks and bogles and dark things. I hear something move in the tangle of bulrushes and bur reeds just a few feet away. My heart’s in my throat, but I move a little closer to see that it’s only a bird caught in some kind of a net.

  Hush, I tell it and move closer.

  The bird gets frantic when I put my hand on the netting. It starts to peck at my fingers, but I keep talking softly to it until it finally settles down. The net’s a mess of knots and tangles and I can’t work too quickly because I don’t want to hurt the bird.

  You should leave him be, a voice says, and I tur
n to find an old woman standing on the path beside me. I don’t know where she came from. Every time I lift one of my feet it makes this creepy sucking sound, but I never even heard her approach.

  She looks like the wizened old crone in that painting Jilly did for Geordie when he got on this kick of learning fiddle tunes with the word “hag” in the title: “The Hag in the Kiln,” “Old Hag You Have Killed Me,” “The Hag With the Money” and God knows how many more.

  Just like in the painting, she’s wizened and small and bent over and…dry. Like kindling, like the pages of an old book. Like she’s almost all used up. Hair thin, body thinner. But then you look into her eyes and they’re so alive it makes you feel a little dizzy.

  Helping such as he will only bring you grief, she says.

  I tell her that I can’t just leave it.

  She looks at me for a long moment, then shrugs. So be it, she says.

  I wait a moment, but she doesn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I go back to freeing the bird. But now, where a moment ago the netting was a hopeless tangle, it just seems to unknot itself as soon as I lay my hand on it. I’m careful when I put my fingers around the bird and pull it free. I get it out of the tangle and then toss it up in the air. It circles above me in the air, once, twice, three times, cawing. Then it flies away.

  It’s not safe here, the old lady says then.

  I’d forgotten all about her. I get back onto the path, my legs smeared with smelly dark mud.

  What do you mean? I ask her.

  When the Moon still walked the sky, she says, it was safe then. The dark things didn’t like her light and fairies fell over themselves to get away when she shone. But they’re bold now, tricked and trapped her, they have, and no one’s safe. Not you, not me. Best we were away.